Ric Writes

This marks my second year in the town of Tura, in the West Garo Hills District and you're now up-to-date!

The year began in Chennai, where I spent a month of the winter vacation with family and friends. There were some other events that will be disclosed at a later point, but I got to spend my vacation with all whom I hold dear- including two especially dear new people in my life.

Upon my return to Tura, I was all set to wander around from school to school, offering my website building services to take the whole report card collection and record-keeping affair into the 21st Century. That endeavour was put on pause because I secured myself a new teaching gig with InSync. With this new employment, I design and implement my own Grammar and Speaking Course in an ELT setting over Zoom for students who are preparing for OET and IELTS. This significantly broadened my horizons and challenged me to think in CELTA-terms once more in a professional way. It has been engaging and rather exciting to teach multiple people online, where I previously had only taught 1 student before, as a math tutor. Having complete freedom to design the materials has also been rather a boost for my confidence, and learning what kinds of activities will work and won't work over zoom has been an invaluable piece of learning.

In the background, however, I've been trying to figure out the best way to sell my website building skills to small businesses in Tura to boost their visibility and to gain more experience with this newly developed skill of mine!

School life has been fun (at least for me!), though the delay in the students' literature textbooks had been somewhat of a stress for the students and myself. I decided to exclusively teach the students four of the poems for the year ("I remember, I remember" by Thomas Hood, "A work of artifice" by Marge Piercy, "The Night Mail" by W.H.Auden and "Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat" by T.S. Eliot). This led to creating an interesting question paper entirely focused on poetry appreciation. As a little perk, I also got to perform Skimbleshanks for the class and suffice it to say, they were bemused to see that an English class could be so dramatic, let alone musical. I was initially complimented on having made the class feel like a Disney movie, which was of course retracted by my sassy adolescent student and replaced with a comment on how "Bollywood" it was. I'll still take the W. I also got to write and direct my students' poem for recitation at the elocution competition and I loved how much they all leaned into the theatricality of it. I'm especially proud of how they bounced back from last year's incident with stage fright.

I shall keep you posted on further updates as they develop. Stay tuned!

After nearly a month spent waiting in Chennai, I got to start on my CELTA- something I'd been looking forward to since July 2024. The course itself was incredibly fun and eye-opening. It was rather stressful, given that it was a 4-week intensive Face-to-Face course but I wouldn't have had it any other way. The approach to teaching at last felt in-line with my own views on pedagogy and how to approach learners. It really was the formal way of approaching learner-directed learning: a skill I'd been looking to hone for long. I managed to get two TP's as exceeding expectations and that was a delightful experience. I even enjoyed the assignments and while I nearly broke down after my penultimate TP, I realised what I needed to put in, to be a quality educator. I cannot recommend the CELTA enough for anyone looking to look at an engaging and illuminating pedagogical method. Travelling from Uthandi (on the ECR) to the British Council in Chennai was a little challenging but I loved getting to spend the cab rides with my dad on the way up and down and the stimulating conversations those rides brought. Although on many evenings on the way back, either one of us would have fallen asleep. I did, however, get to extensively use the metro and that was definitely a thrill. Huge, huge fan of public transport and well-maintained public transport. Thank you, M.K. Stalin!

Armed with a CELTA and a desire to make it as an English tutor, I tried my hand at applying for online tutoring gigs. They were rather dismal attempts and the platforms didn't instill what I would call confidence in any real form. I tried to exploit as many contacts in Tura as I could. After securing a sum total of 2 interviews (with Don Bosco College and the Garo Baptist Convention), I convinced my parents that I had to travel to Tura to try and make it as an English tutor out there. I planned out how I would conduct workshops for teachers at schools to make grammar lessons more engaging and packed my bags, ready to try out a week of approaching schools. Once I reached Tura, I checked into my erstwhile favourite hotel, Rikman Continental, right in Tura Bazaar. Having earned goodwill with them in the past, I was able to get something of a discount. The very first day was a visit to the Don Bosco College campus and a meeting with Fr. Januarius Sangma. His response was promising but he did say that it would take time to develop sufficient interest in an extra class and that the summer break would be a better time to conduct my sessions. Unfazed, I told him to keep me in mind for the upcoming summer vacation. The next day, a Friday, I went to the Garo Baptist Convention to meet with my contact to talk about offering my workshop to the schools under their stewardship. This, too, seemed promising, but was tempered by a requirement to meet with their board. A little deflated, I realised I had to visit every school I could in the town to directly pitch my workshop idea to the headmistresses and headmasters. The weekend was spent in Daribokgre, meeting up with the villagers and spending time with the kids whom I adored. I was also told by the then-occupants of the bus that I was becoming a persona non-grata to Sadhana Forest. That's what you get for helping an NGO for 5 years and after your time as well, out of concern for the new project members.

I told my parents that I would return to Chennai following a week if I didn't land any meaningful workshop deal and since it was a long weekend (31st March being a holiday for some reason), I returned to Tura on Monday, the 31st. I decided to try a whole new direction in Tura, which I had never travelled to before - past the Civil Hospital (This is it, Mr Frodo, if I take one more step... and all that). I had a list of schools to visit down that way, starting with Sherwood school, which my contact in Tura told me was a premier institution and would be open to my offerings. I hired an auto on April 1st, to take me to Sherwood and to work my way back to the town by visiting schools along the way. The school itself looked impressive and was well maintained. I got to speak to the Headmistress who wanted to include me as a part-time grammar teacher/resource person but was unsure of how I would fit in with their curriculum. I assured her that the activities would cover the curriculum. She was a little uncertain but pointed me in the direction of another school, The Learning Sanctuary, whose founder had founded Sherwood school years ago and would be open to such workshops. Sure enough, I hopped back into the auto and headed down to the Learning Sanctuary. I waited for sometime outside the Headmaster's room, where I spoke to the supporting staff in Garo, much to their amazement and amusement. The Headmaster eventually returned from his rounds and ushered me in. I pitched my workshop idea and he asked me if I would be able to handle class 8 students. I told him truthfully that that was the age group I felt most comfortable with. He asked me if I could handle literature along with grammar. I told him that I would be up for the task and shared that I love poetry. He said that I would then be hired to teach his Class 8 students Literature and Language. Apparently, the person whom he had hired had cancelled on coming over to Tura just that weekend (the long weekend). Initially, I thought that this was an April Fool's prank, but as he showed me around the Staff room, sat me next to a particularly intelligent and fun teacher- a place I would come to deeply cherish, and invited me to join in a training on how to use the Interactive White Boards (the thing I lived on during my CELTA), I realised that I was hired. To date, incidentally, he didn't get to see my grammar workshop poster. It was a miracle. He also asked me to take the inaugural GK class. The students were, at first, quiet and calm, but over the course of the class, I managed to bring out their wonderful, engaging selves.

Through much of the year, I applied my newfound techniques through the CELTA course to my classes. It's been fun, making grammar that much more enjoyable for them. I remember groaning when it was grammar lessons for us. Some of the students commented on how much they appreciate being alive and heard in my classes. It has truly been a fulfilling experience. Being their classteacher also came with some other challenges- navigating conflict (for which I got to use some of the NVC techniques I picked up over the years), managing contenders for events and holding auditions. There had been a few hiccoughs along the way - the recitation of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" for instance- didn't go as planned. But together, we've bounced back and learned, and dare I say it at the risk of sounding cliched, we grew together.

I found the prospect of doing a massive chart as a marksheet rather tedious and frankly inefficient in the 21st century so I decided to figure out a way to write a macro code for me to be able to export the marksheet data into pdf's in a few moments. It took some refining and troubleshooting with my friend, the Chap, GPT. We eventually managed to get it working really well and used my own class and one other class' data to generate report cards in a new manner. This was just the beginning. I wanted to get ALL the data across the school to be centrally collected and deployed, so as to save countless human-hours on an admin level (where the admin personnel had to previously type out individual marks per student per class previously), and to decentralise the responsibility of collecting data from just the class teachers to all the relevant subject teachers. I briefly flirted with the idea of using Google Forms and creating layer after layer of conditions to ensure all relevant data was collected. This seemed less exciting than I originally thought. That led me to think of creating a website that would do all of this. And so, with this goal in mind- damned if I'd do another master marksheet and subject other teachers to the arduous task of maintaining such sheets- I embarked on a journey to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, JS and React to be able to render this entire project. It took a few months, some minor cussing in the middle of the night and faith in my ability to learn new skills to get to finally producing the primary website for our school, along with the backend services that have only since expanded. You can check out the school website as it looks now over here. I owe it to the Headmaster for having taken a chance on me and my growing skills to undertake this project and execute it with some level of finesse, if I do say so myself. Ultimately, that's all that I've needed for any stage of my career - someone to give me that chance and the space to grow. He had also generously remunerated me for my continued services.

Filled with this renewed sense of worth and faith in my own abilities (faith misplaced, it may not be), I decided to reach out to the founder of the cult, to get in touch with him about possibly remunerating me for the tool that I created (more on that in the upcoming posts). He initially said he was open to questions. When I asked a question about someone else getting remunerated for my work (liaising and bringing in donors), he suddenly flipped and said that I was bringing negative energy to the cult (italics added from my side) by asking questions. Then blocked me. So much for "compassion" and properly handling situations.

I ended the year with a great fondness for the kids I was working with and a better understanding of myself through my own growth and through my interactions with a whole new kind of affection that I had hitherto been unaccustomed to!

Stay tuned!